In the field of electronics production, printed circuit boards or subassemblies to be produced are produced on surface mounted technology (SMT) fitting lines via surface mounting. However, due to technical restrictions, not every printed circuit board may be produced on every fitting line. The printed circuit boards also usually have different production times on the fitting lines. In addition, the maximum production time capacities of the fitting lines must not be exceeded.
DE 10 2009 013 353 B3 shows a method for equipping such a fitting line.
EP 0 478 360 A1 relates to another fitting method in which an attempt is made to improve a set-up time for a production line for fitting printed circuit boards with components.
Hans-Otto Günther et al. “Workload planning in small lot printed circuit board assembly”, OR Spectrum, Vol. 19, No. 2, Jun. 1, 1997, pages 147-157 relates to the planning of a workload during the automated fitting of printed circuit boards with components.
EP 0 478 361 A1 relates to a method for fitting printed circuit boards with components, in which case a production frequency of a printed circuit board type and the components needed for production are taken into account.
Printed circuit boards are usually allocated to fitting lines of a fitting system manually or semi-automatically on the basis of empirical values or heuristics. In this case, unbalanced allocations are repeatedly made, which causes high utilization of one component of a fitting line with low utilization of another component, with the result that the fitting system is not used in an optimal manner.